Leslie Lopez is a social anthropologist, and a Lecturer at UCSC–in Community Engagement at Oakes College, and in the Community Studies Department.
At Oakes, Leslie has specialized in program design and development, creating the Writing Center (2011-13); the Corre la Voz After-school Program—a UC Links project for innovative university-community engagement in education; and the Oakes Community Engagement Program, beginning in 2013. The Oakes Community Engagement Program (since 2016, the CARA Program) was created to develop Oakes students’ pathways for community engagement in a sustainable way, by building long-term program relationships in the community and on campus.
Since 2017, Leslie has focused program development work more intensively on regional networks for immigrant justice. This led to the Puentes Program for Legal Aid and Promotor training, and to the We Belong Collaboration for Community-Engaged Research for Immigrant Justice.
Leslie’s areas of methods specialization include bilingual teacher/tutor training (English-Spanish) and multimodal critical literacies; journalism; participatory action research; and qualitative research methods (oral history, ethnography, community mapping). Research interests include social systems analysis (health care, schools, media) and political culture development for justice, especially in Mexico and the US.
Leslie is proud to be the first woman in her family to go to college (UCSC), and to have earned a PhD while raising two children. Since returning from fieldwork in 2002, Leslie has taught in a variety of UCSC programs, including Journalism and Writing Programs, Latin American and Latinx Studies, and the Education Department; she also served as Program Coordinator for SCWIBLES (Santa Cruz-Watsonville Inquiry-Based Learning in Environmental Science). Ultimately, she still finds working with kids as well as and working to do them justice the most intellectually and morally stimulating sub-fields of social anthropology.